The day I crashed out of Wimbledon
At 15, Venus Williams signed a $12 million contract. At 16, I won my club tennis championship - B Grade. The win that counts is being yourself.
When I was a teenager, I loved playing tennis and played a lot with my special partner, The Wall.
Aged 14, at a school holiday tennis clinic I upgraded from a lollipop serve to a hard serve, double-faulting for a full two months until I mastered it.
On Thursdays at dawn, I rushed barefoot onto the dewy lawn to fetch the local newspaper which ran match reports. My dad said I caught that newspaper on the full.
Keen teens played in the club’s adult competition until dispatched to a junior league by adults who did not want us. This incensed me as the junior competition was small, and we could hold our own against the adults. Therein lay the problem.
My response was to practice and improve. Noel, the curator of our clay courts coached me in the mornings before school.
At 16, I won our club championship for women’s singles – B Grade.
At 15, Venus Williams signed her first contract for US$12 million.
Also at 16, my game was dismantled by a cute 11-year-old at the regional school titles. The dream was over. I was one of a billion kids faced with the reality that I’d not be a sports star.
But tennis remained with me, wherever I went. The game is the same in any language, and on all sorts of playing surfaces.
Near Amiens in France, I played with friends in their farm courtyard. They painted a singles court on the concrete and rigged up a steel pipe perched on small drums, and taped plastic bottles for a net. Quentin, keen for distraction from Baccalaureate prep and a broken leg, played in full leg plaster and a long shirt over his underpants!
Clubs can be, well clubby, and cliquey and may under-estimate you
In London, I joined a tennis club and was keen to play in a competition. But the women’s team had other ideas. They were a clique, so they said I should be a reserve because I wasn’t as strong. It felt important to me to prove them wrong. So I entered a club tournament, called the handicap tournament in which every player was graded, with points added or subtracted from their game score. A week or two before the tournament I realised I was pregnant for the first time. Feeling fine, I still wanted to play. Again they had underestimated me. I won every match and then won the tournament. As you can guess the clique did not care.
A week or so later I miscarried.
My other win was a Pimm’s tournament, named for the oddly delightful beverage served in the English summer. Winners drank a double Pimm’s after each match. My partner and I won and drank Pimm’s all day. It made me carefree and impaired the semi-professional player on the other side of the net.
A tournament based on inebriation seems so 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, even though by then it was the 1990s. The trophy, an ornate large silver punch bowl lived on my kitchen dresser. A year later a woman from the clique called to say they needed the trophy back. Could I get it to them urgently?
‘I had a baby five days ago and am confined to bed,’ I said. It had been a difficult delivery - MASSIVE UNDERSTATEMENT. ‘We need the trophy,’ she said, without care, or well wishes, as she rang off.
I figured out a way to get the trophy back without my leaving my bed. Why could the clique woman not realise that kindness takes no more time?
Does anybody ever not care about winning?
On July 10 this year I got up in the middle of the night to watch the Wimbledon men’s final between Nick Kyrgios of Australia and Novak Djokovic.
By turns, brilliant, and difficult to watch, Kyrgios yells at his team and talks constantly when play is not going his way. He’s said he lacks the desire of Djokovic, Federer or Nadal to be at the very top. That’s what he says. It’s probably true, as he makes a good living and plays at the best events.
But I wonder. Perhaps John McEnroe summed it up best in The Guardian. ‘I think he’s [Kyrgios] is just trying to deal with his nerves and that fear of failure we all have.’ said McEnroe. ‘His way of dealing with it is obviously different than others…’
Would he love to be at the top? Does he wrestle with his internal resistance like writers and many others do?
The three-day semi-final and the Monday final
Sunday, July 7, 2001 - In the sitting room of an East Sussex bungalow amid the roses, hydrangeas and topiary, we watched the second men’s semi-final of Wimbledon. We also celebrated my mother-in-law’s birthday which was always during Wimbledon. Funny, as she was the only family member who did not play tennis. My father-in-law played until a few weeks before his death.
This semi had stretched from Friday to Sunday because of rain delays. For the first time in history, the men’s final was planned for Monday with 14,000 tickets to be sold at £40. There was a humph in the sitting room at this news. ‘For--ty pounds!
Understandable from people who had lived through the era of war rations, and had lived close to Wimbledon, spending golden evenings watching matches on the outside courts and often being handed show court tickets by departing spectators.
Goran Ivanisevic and Tim Henman contested the second semi and I was so happy, so not sorry, when Tim lost. It meant British fans would not stampede SW19 to queue for the final. Waiting for the winner was Patrick Rafter who defeated Andre Agassi in a marathon first semi-final on Friday.
‘I’m going,’ I announced to everyone in the sitting room. What was £40 and a queue if I could see Rafter, one of my favourite players, in a final?
When I was dropped off by my kind husband, I joined a line that stretched across a field and would witness the sun rays glisten on the dew. It filled a few minutes of the seven-hour wait. I received a sticker to say that I was 2,300-something. I was in.
All of the camraderie of the queue fell away as we were admitted to the grounds. We tore inside to grab the best seat. For me, it was a dozen rows behind the team boxes with the Royal Box down to my left.
In the raucous Monday crowd of 2001, the atmosphere was gladiatorial, and most of all in the fourth set. Rafter looked like equalising. Was it Goran’s destiny to win? Not if I could help it. I cheered.
Everyone was yelling, from Jack Nicholson in the Members area to Shane Warne, Steve Waugh and the rest of the Australian Cricket Team at the other end of the court, me, the woman next to me, and 13,998 other fans. There were no passive spectators. We yelled, none more than the Croatian supporters who drowned the rest of us out.
A match can turn on a penny. So many what-ifs. What if it had gone to the fifth? What if the player prepped differently? A few years ago a long-retired player shared their theory with me about Pat Rafter in that the final. The problem they said was that Rafter had varied from his usual match preparation by going to the airport to meet his family members who had flown from Australia at the last minute. Who can say if that changed anything? Not even Rafter I’d bet.
It was not a question I put to Rafter during a 10-minute conversation a couple of years later, though we talked about that final. Was I going to write an exposé 15 years after the event? No. It was over.
He said he doesn’t play much tennis these days. He trains on the beach, a bit of running, swimming and footy with a few mates.
He spoke that night of the future and a young player called Ash Barty. He said she had everything needed to reach the top. And she did. Then at the top of the game, she left. The Barty Party was great while it lasted. Her mindset stood out. She played tennis but it was not all she was, who she was. At her last grand slam, the Australian Open when asked if she would be watching the other semi-final she said no, she would binging The Office on Netflix. Her tennis involvement now will be in helping young players, particularly indigenous youth. How I wish I had seen her play live.
C’Mon! The Lleyton Hewitt final from the slightly cheap-er seats.
In 2002, I scored tickets for the final again, but this time in a ballot drawn months before. Australian Lleyton Hewitt and Argentinian David Nalbandian emerged as finalists. The match did not hold the same excitement as the final of 2001. Hewitt was World Number 1 and Nalbandian a Wimbledon debutante.
By the time of the final, I was eight months pregnant. J dropped me at the gate to spare me a trudge. Sadly, this did not spare me and my friend Nancy a climb to our seats up with the gods. In sensible flat sandals and a chambray maternity dress that served me for two English summer pregnancies I heaved myself to the top. Any view in Centre Court is great but when I saw how high we had to climb, I had to reframe rapidly. Yes, I had been much closer to the action in 2001. But we had an excellent panoramic view of the court and I would be seeing Hewitt play for the first time. C’Mon!
It was Hewitt’s time. He had won the 2001 US Open, an accomplishment somewhat pushed from memory by the 9/11 terror attacks in New York two days after that final.
The match was one-sided as predicted amid diversions of a rain delay and a streaker. Not yet tennis-ed out, Nancy and I stayed on to watch doubles.
Then it was time to leave. As I took my first steps down the aisle, I tumbled forwards, belly-planting on the concrete stairs.
Gasps and cries rang out around me as loud as for at any point in the match.
‘Are you OK? Don’t move. We’re calling the first aid’ said the armed forces usher.
‘I’m fine,’ I said, shaken.
’You’re not to move.’ That was easy as I was unsure I could get up at all.
In a minute or so the St John’s ambulance crew were crouched beside me. ‘We’re going to get you out of here.’ Gently they helped me stand and we made our way to the corridor.
‘It’s fine really.’ I had a graze or two, and a mark from the concrete step on my dress.
‘No, we can’t let you go without checking you out,’ said the St. John’s Ambulance officer. ‘We are getting a wheelchair.’
The wheelchair arrived, a basic contraption into which I was assisted to wedge my enlarged body. As they wheeled me along the terrace behind the top section of seating. I decided it was probably the right thing to do.
Staring down the precipe of 4 flights of stairs while strapped in a wheelchair
Until. We reached the top of emergency exit stairs. No one else was on them. These stairs kept going forever. Perhaps four storeys high or more, and way below was the concourse. Looking down the precipice.
‘We are going to carry you down,’ said one of the officers.
I’ve never been good at looking down in places where you could see where you might fall a long way. OMG!
‘No, I’ll be fine. I can walk down, I am sure of it if I just can hold the rail and someone stays on the other side. ‘I’ll just take my time. Pleeeesssssassssse.’
‘We are required to carry you, madam.
This felt way more stressful than anything on my plate at the time, pregnancy, a cancer diagnosis, and builders at work at my home.
They, the officers, had carried many people down these stairs many times before but I had never done this before.
About two-thirds of the way down, a man climbed the steps toward us. I recognised him. He looked towards me, expressionless whereas I was red-faced, a giant blob of \chambray wedged into a wheelchair being carried down these stairs. He didn’t say anything. I guess Allan Mills, (tournament referee from 1982 to 2005) had many things on his mind, even if by that time tournament play was completed.
That was the day I crashed out of Wimbledon.
There are times when you must follow the signs
For a long time - some years - I barely played. Nothing to do with the clique whom I’d almost forgotten until writing this. Life interrupted.
Then came a sign. A tennis centre was to be built in my street, with all the Grand Slam playing surfaces. It started with hard and clay courts and now has lawn courts with Edwards posts from the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club
My serve was there - kinda - but my groundstrokes were rusty. I despaired at missing so often, apologising endlessly. After a few unforced errors, my mind bundled up all the failures and weaknesses in my life, real or perceived. You failed to finish that project, or you didn't get that job AND you can’t even hit a forehand. Then I would tell myself to focus. And I would try….
In mid-2021 I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyper-Activity Disorder (ADHD). After starting a prescribed medication my emotional sensitivity to perceived failures eased. I felt compassion for myself. On the tennis court, I enjoyed the game more than ever as I was able to focus on the moment, and choose my shots. For the first time I felt like I was ‘in’ the game and not a casual presence on the court. I did not magically become a better player. My fitness and skill level were the same. But at least I was better able to focus on that. Maybe now, I will even master spin, hitherto a random element of my game.
I think about winning, a point or a service game, or a set to challenge and better myself. But not beyond that. The win is in the exercise, the friendship, and being in the sunshine. A game for a lifetime. A love game, set and match.
The win is in the experience. Thank you for this important reminder Marian. I always love reading your work.
Oh PS this is my first social media thing, besides emails. I have just learnt the first post didn't disappear it just sunk down like a pebble in a wishing well. LOL